PSS: Alec Koppers

The recurring Philosophy Seminar Series organized by Keaton Jahn, Alex Papanikolaou, and Alex Dickison. This week's presenter is Alec Koppers, topic: "Physician, Heal Thy Industry: Understanding the 'info-demic' as a Crisis of Values and Institutions." Abstract: "Medical misinformation is not a new problem; it is as popular a grift as any, and as resistant to treatment as cancer. Despite medicine’s consistent coexistence with misinformation, the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, and the US Department of Health and Human Services have declared that the continued influx of online medical misinformation surrounding Covid-19 has itself become a deadly public health crisis, labeling it as an ‘info-demic’. In this paper, I first argue that the American capitalist mode of production for healthcare has caused the proliferation of medical misinformation in America. Next, I provide a theoretical framework for understanding the ‘info-demic’ as a public health crisis. Privatized healthcare, I contend, has caused a deficit of trust due to systemically deprioritizing patient health, leading to poor health outcomes for the nation’s poor and middle class. Resultantly many who distrust traditional medical authorities are wholly rational, yet their distrust in medical institutions will frustrate the medical values that define the current age of American medical ethics— informed consent, autonomy, beneficence, justice and non-maleficence. Rational patients who believe in medical misinformation are often treated as unable to autonomously direct their own care, despite their cognitive capacities being otherwise wholly ordinary. Therefore, I argue that insofar that the ‘infodemic’ is a public health crisis, it is a crisis of values and presents an existential threat to our liberal medical values and capitalist healthcare institutions."